Deploying and updating software are often tedious and time-consuming tasks for users and system administrators. Procedures and tools are sought for quickly and efficiently deploying, replicating, updating, and managing system structures and software for many systems. Suitable tools can also be useful for reprovisioning systems whereby a hardware resource subject to failure can be reprovisioned using the tools to replace failed hardware from a free resource pool. A capability to perform rolling system upgrades may also be sought whereby a large number of systems are supplied with software upgrades, managed, and scheduled for initialization or reboot at a specified time or in a controlled sequence, enabling a predictable transition to upgraded software.
Conventional techniques in the process of automated system creation entail either manually repeating a set of disparate steps or scripting command line invocations. The process of repeating steps can be faulty due to the inefficiency and susceptibility to error inherent in reentry of identical fields. Usage of command line invocations, often the scripting can be too restrictive and does not offer a sufficiently wide range of configuration values. Furthermore, user or system manager imposed scripting implementations can be difficult to maintain and have to be created for each unique circumstance.
Some tools automate individual parts of the overall configuration, but do not allow provisioning of an entire hierarchical setup.